Well, not in the case of Chicago http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/amazon-hq2-c...
> strengthening the housing market
Like the strong SF housing market which nobody can afford?
Talk to anyone who grew up in Seattle or SF pre-tech boom and you might find a different perspective. I think it's worth considering that while it's great for us in tech it's not like it's a net-win for everyone else.
If you work in an industry outside of tech(or a part of tech that doesn't track payscales like the game industry) you may get pushed out of a city/metro just by nature of the impact tech has.
I think I'd rather live in a city that's so popular that infrastructure can't keep up than to live in a city where entire neighborhoods are empty and are razed due to neglect and criminal activities.
Or they can hit the "Amazon lottery", bringing in billions of dollars of investment and 50,000 high paid jobs (plus all of the ancillary jobs to support these high paid workers).
So a community could very well face a binary choice.
Er, “as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs” is what Amazon claims HQ2 is planned to grow to over an unspecified time horizon. “As many as...” is marketing weasel words for “for some number definitely not exceeding, and probably much smaller than...”; it sets an upper bound, but counts on people treating it as an expected level.
That's overly hopeful. I doubt Amazon will seriously consider a dying ex-company town that needs the investment. My bet it's going to pick someplace that's already doing pretty well, overall.
Which is a unmitigated benefit only to some current real estate property owners and an almost-entirely unmitigated cost to everyone else.
Other than code for "making everything much more unaffordable", what does this mean?
And yeah, it's pollution for those who don't have high paying tech jobs. There are more people living in those cities than Amazon employees; their interests and needs need to be taking into consideration as well.
Owning a house has been a part of the post-WW2 American dream for good reason, and it should remain so. And people buying homes should want their property to retain value
Shouldn't this have played out just like that in SF then?
Companies that compete for talent will be pissed, but for lots of others it's a huge win. The only way I see it as a "bad" thing is if you are in a small city that wants to remain small.
It's absolutely nothing like building a McDonalds.